1 Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Choose to Remain Non-Sovereign in the 1860s Andrew Smith, University of Liverpool [email protected]THIS PAPER IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND MUST NOT BE CITED, QUOTED, OR REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR In the early 1770s, virtually all of the Western Hemisphere was subject to or claimed by a European sovereign. 1 The Atlantic Revolutions that began in the Thirteen Colonies in the 1770s swept this system of sovereignty. 2 By the 1860s, the British North American colonies were a hemispheric anomaly in the sense that they were the only large regions of the American mainland that were still part of a European colonial empire. As I have demonstrated elsewhere, the federation of the British North American colonies between 1867 and 1873 was intended to preserve this rather unusual status. 3 In my first works on Confederation, I advanced an essentially economic explanation for why Canadians opted to remain part of the British Empire. 4 In this paper, I wish to supplement this economic explanation by integrating culture and race into our explanation. This paper will suggest that in explaining why the political classes of British North America choose not to establish a fully sovereign state in the 1860s, we need to consider developments elsewhere in the Americas. 1 Lauren Benton has demonstrated that the claims to sovereignty represented by European maps of colonial empires were, in practice, somewhat ineffectual, particularly in inland areas. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her argument is congruent with the earlier research of Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities. The Problem of Governance in the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World”, in Negotiated Authorities. Essays in Colonial Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 1994), 1-24. I would like to thank Jay Sexton and Marise Bachand for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 John Lynch, ed. Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826: Old and New World Origins (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994); Caitlin Fitz, “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010). 3 Andrew Smith, “The Reaction of the City of London to the Quebec Resolutions, 1864-1866,” Journal of the Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada 17, no. 1 (2006): 1-24. 4 Andrew Smith, British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution Making in an Era of Anglo- Globalization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press, 2008).
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1
Confederation as a Hemispheric Anomaly: Why Canada Choose to Remain Non-Sovereign in the 1860s
THIS PAPER IS A WORK IN PROGRESS AND MUST NOT BE CITED, QUOTED, OR
REPRODUCED WITHOUT THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR
In the early 1770s, virtually all of the Western Hemisphere was subject to or claimed
by a European sovereign.1 The Atlantic Revolutions that began in the Thirteen Colonies in
the 1770s swept this system of sovereignty.2 By the 1860s, the British North American
colonies were a hemispheric anomaly in the sense that they were the only large regions of
the American mainland that were still part of a European colonial empire. As I have
demonstrated elsewhere, the federation of the British North American colonies between 1867
and 1873 was intended to preserve this rather unusual status.3 In my first works on
Confederation, I advanced an essentially economic explanation for why Canadians opted to
remain part of the British Empire.4 In this paper, I wish to supplement this economic
explanation by integrating culture and race into our explanation. This paper will suggest that
in explaining why the political classes of British North America choose not to establish a
fully sovereign state in the 1860s, we need to consider developments elsewhere in the
Americas.
1 Lauren Benton has demonstrated that the claims to sovereignty represented by European maps of colonial
empires were, in practice, somewhat ineffectual, particularly in inland areas. A Search for Sovereignty: Law and
Geography in European Empires, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Her argument is
congruent with the earlier research of Jack P. Greene, “Negotiated Authorities. The Problem of Governance in
the Extended Polities of the Early Modern Atlantic World”, in Negotiated Authorities. Essays in Colonial
Political and Constitutional History (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 1994), 1-24. I would like to
thank Jay Sexton and Marise Bachand for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. 2 John Lynch, ed. Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826: Old and New World Origins (Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1994); Caitlin Fitz, “Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American
Revolutions” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2010). 3 Andrew Smith, “The Reaction of the City of London to the Quebec Resolutions, 1864-1866,” Journal of the
Canadian Historical Association/Revue de la Société historique du Canada 17, no. 1 (2006): 1-24. 4 Andrew Smith, British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution Making in an Era of Anglo-
Globalization (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's Press, 2008).
In the last two decades, many Canadian historians have adopted a British World
perspective. This approach to historical writing emphasises Canada’s links to, and close
identification with, the British Empire and has resulted in the publication of a number of
important works that either compare the experience of Canada with that of Canada and New
Zealand or examine relations between Canada and these countries as well as Britain.5 The
British-World approach is certainly helpful in understanding many aspects of Canadian
history. Indeed, I have applied the British World approach in the research I have published in
history and political-science journals.6 However, I now feel that to understand the motives of
the creators of the Canadian constitution of 1867, we must place British North America in the
1860s in a hemispheric context as well as in a British imperial one. Doing so helps to explain
why the creators of the 1867 constitution opted for non-sovereignty (i.e., Canada’s continued
subordination to the political institutions of the British Empire).
Sovereignty
The definition of “sovereignty” has been contested by scholars working in law,
international relations, and other disciplines.7 For Canadians who grew up in the late
twentieth century, the word acquired a particular set of associations because advocates of
Quebec independence labelled their preferred constitutional order as “sovereignty” or
“sovereignty-association,” deliberately ambiguous terms that were designed to appeal to
voters who might have been afraid to vote for the less ambiguous term “independence.”8 The
5 Phillip Buckner and R. Douglas Francis, eds. Canada and the British world: culture, migration, and identity.
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011); Katie Pickles, “Transnational History and Cultural
Cringe: Some Issues for Consideration in New Zealand, Australia and Canada,” History Compass 9, no. 9
(2011): 657-673; Margaret MacMillan and Francine McKenzie, eds, Parties Long Estranged: Canada and
Australia in the Twentieth Century (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003). 6 Andrew Smith, “Thomas Bassett Macaulay and the Bahamas: Racism, business and Canadian sub-
imperialism,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 37, no. 1 (2009): 29-50; Andrew Smith and
Jatinder Mann, “A tale of two ex-dominions: why the procedures for changing the rules of succession are so
different in Canada and Australia,” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 52, no. 3 (2014): 376-401. 7 Jayan Nayar, “On the Elusive Subject of Sovereignty,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 39, no. 2 (2014):
124-147; Hent Kalmo and Quentin Skinner, eds, Sovereignty in fragments: the past, present and future of a
contested concept (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 8 Stéphane Dion, “The dynamic of secessions: scenarios after a pro-separatist vote in a Quebec
referendum,” Canadian Journal of Political Science 28, no. 03 (1995): 533-551; Claude Ryan, Consequences of
the Quebec Secession Reference: The Clarity Bill and Beyond (Montreal: CD Howe Institute, 2000).
3
working definition of sovereignty adopted in this paper is: “a normative conception that links
authority, territory (population, society) and recognition” in international society.9
Sovereignty, in this definition, relates to both internal sovereignty (control over subjects and
a monopoly over the legitimate use of force) and external sovereignty and the juridical
personhood of the state in the eyes of the international community.10
The Canadian
constitution of 1867, which was an act of the British parliament, produced a state that was
quasi-sovereign in that it possessed a degree of internal sovereignty while not yet enjoying
juridical personhood in the eyes of the international community.11
In 1865, a Canadian
politician accurately described the powers of the British parliament over the colonies,
remarking that is has “sovereign and uncontrollable authority in making, codifying, enlarging,
restraining repealing, revising and expounding of laws.”12
Somewhat confusingly, British
North Americans in the constitutional moment of the 1860s referred to both the tripartite
British parliament and the person of Queen Victoria as the “sovereign” power in the empire.
This confusion stemmed from the common practice of referring to monarchs as “sovereigns,”
even though only the King/Queen-in-Parliament has been sovereign since 1688.13
Regardless of this terminological confusion, most Canadian legislators agreed that the
state of affairs whereby ultimate sovereignty lay (somewhere) in London should continue.
When a politician declared during the debates on Confederation that “our first act should
have been to recognize the sovereignty of Her Majesty” he was cheered by his fellow
legislators.14
When discussing the division of powers between the future federal and
provincial governments, the prevailing view was that most sovereign powers should be
exercised by the national government: the US experiment with states’ rights and state
9 Eiki Berg and Ene Kuusk, “What makes sovereignty a relative concept? Empirical approaches to international
society,” Political Geography 29, no. 1 (2010): 40. 10
Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and sovereignty: Rethinking legality, legitimacy, and constitutionalism.
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 26-27. 11
Philip Noel-Baker Noel-Baker, The Present Juridical Status of the British Dominions in International Law.
(London: Longmans, Green, 1929). 12
Canada. Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces,
3rd Session, 8th Provincial Parliament of Canada (Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co., parliamentary printers, 1865),
220. 13
Noel Cox, “The theory of sovereignty and the importance of the Crown in the realms of the Queen,” Oxford
University Commonwealth Law Journal 2 (2002). 14
Canada. Parliamentary Debates on the Subject of the Confederation of the British North American Provinces,
3rd Session, 8th Provincial Parliament of Canada (Quebec: Hunter, Rose & Co., parliamentary printers, 1865),
33.
4
sovereignty should be avoided at all costs.15
During the debates on the proposed constitution,
one legislator opined that the future federal government should be “armed with a sovereignty
which mav be worthy of the name.” He remarked that “all good governments… have
somewhere a true sovereign power. A sovereign which ever eludes your grasp, which has no
local habitation, provincial or imperial, is in fact no government at all.”16
Sovereignty, strong
government, and centralization were linked in the eyes of most of the creators of the 1867
constitution. The creators of the 1867 constitution rejected the idea of popular sovereignty,17
which is one of the reasons the proposed union of the colonies was not put the electorate in
referenda, in sharp contrast to the practice adopted prior to the federation of the Australian
colonies a generation later. 18
At this point, it is worthwhile making several observations about sovereignty. First,
sovereignty is a matter of degrees, not absolutes, as the legal history of the British Empire-
Commonwealth has demonstrated. Canada, for instance, attained sovereignty incrementally
over a long period that extended from the grant of Responsible Government in the 1840s up
to the Statute of Westminster in 1931, the emergence of a separate Canadian diplomatic corps
in the interwar period, the creation of the legal category of Canadian citizen in 1947, the
abolition of appeals from the Canadian Supreme Court to the British courts in 1949, and the
patriation of the Canadian constitution in 1982.19
In 1982, Canada used a controversial
procedure to acquire the ability to amend its written constitution without the future
involvement of the British parliament.20
Some present-day Canadian republicans might even
argue that the process of establishing Canadian sovereignty will not be entirely complete until
Canada sheds its remaining ties to the British monarch. The fact that Canada attained
sovereignty in a peaceful and evolutionary process is a source of pride for many Canadians.
15
Ibid, 433, 440. 16
Ibid, 539. 17
Bruce W. Hodgins, “Democracy and the Ontario Fathers of Confederation”, in Edith G. Firth (ed.), Profiles of
a Province: Studies in the History of Ontario (Toronto, 1967), 83-91. 18
Helen Irving, “Sister Colonies with Separate Constitutions: Why Australian Federationists Rejected the
Canadian Constitution” in Shaping Nations: Constitutionalism and Society in Australia and Canada edited by
Linda Cardinal and David Headon (Ottawa : University of Ottawa Press, 2002), 27-38. 19
For these developments, see Peter H. Russell, Constitutional Odyssey: Can Canadians become a sovereign
people? (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004); Daniel Clarry, “Institutional Judicial Independence and
the Privy Council,” Cambridge Journal of International and Comparative Law 3 (2014): 46; Philip Gerard,
“Imperial Legacies: Chartered Enterprises in Northern British America” in Shaunnagh Dorsett and John
McLaren, eds. Legal Histories of the British Empire: Laws, Engagements and Legacies (London: Routledge,
2014), 127-140. 20
For the controversy, see Frédéric Bastien, La Bataille De Londres (Montreal: Boréal, 2013).
5
Second, we must avoid the trap of thinking that sovereignty is necessarily normative,
an idea that is promoted by nationalists of various types, not to mention advocates of
“economic sovereignty,” “tribal sovereignty,” “American exceptionalism,” and British
withdrawal from the European Union. The concept of sovereignty is a relatively recent
phenomenon in the history of Western political thought.21
In the non-Western world, the
systems for structuring relations between political units did not come to resemble
Westphalian sovereignty until the late nineteenth century.22
The concept of sovereignty
diffused slowly from Europe to the non-European world.23
The 1776 Declaration of
Independence was of crucial importance in promoting the sovereignty meme in many parts of
the globe.24
The process by which the concept of sovereignty was diffused was connected to
the worldwide diffusion of nationalism.25
Even today, however, many individuals dissent
from the idea that is normative for the territories in which they live to become sovereign. In
recent decades, many liberal nation-states, particularly in Europe, have been moving away
from the norm of Westphalian sovereignty in both doctrine and praxis. As the Israeli-
American sociologist Amitai Etzioni has noted, some of the strongest proponents of the
Westphalian concept of sovereignty are authoritarian regimes.26
Third, research in both International Political Economy, International Business, and
history shows that the relationship between nation-state sovereignty and global capitalism is a
complex one.27
It is difficult to say definitively whether globalization is incompatible with
21
Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1985) ; Daniel Philpott, “Sovereignty: an Introduction and Brief History,” Journal of
International Affairs 48, no. 2 (1995): 353. 22
Erik Ringmar, “Performing International Systems: two East-Asian Alternatives to the Westphalian
Order,” International Organization 66, no. 1 (2012): 1-25; Turan Kayaoglu, “The Extension of Westphalian
Sovereignty: State Building and the Abolition of Extraterritoriality,” International Studies Quarterly 51, no. 3
(2007): 649-675. 23
Terry Nardin, “The Diffusion of Sovereignty,” History of European Ideas 41, no. 1 (2015): 89-102. 24
David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: a Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2007). 25
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London:
Verso Books, 2006); David Cannadine, The Undivided Past: History Beyond our Differences (London: Penguin
UK, 2013), 69-84 26
Amitai Etzioni, “Point of Order: Is China More Westphalian Than the West?,” Foreign Affairs (2011): 172-
176. 27
Raymond Vernon, “Economic Sovereignty at Bay,” Foreign Affairs (1968): 110-122; Giovanni
Arrighi, Globalization, state sovereignty, and the ‘endless’ accumulation of capital (Lanham: Rowman and
Littlefield, 2000); Sönke Kunkel, “Contesting Globalization: The United Nations Conference on Trade and
6
national sovereignty.28
The present-day debate about the relationship between sovereignty
and globalization is relevant to understanding North America in the 1860s because the
nineteenth century, particularly the period after 1850 or so, was an era of rapid globalization,
particularly in the regions around the North Atlantic.29
According to most historians of
globalization the process of global economic integration continued until 1914, when the
world abruptly began a phase of de-globalization.30
Among the scholars who have charted the rise, fall, and rise of global capitalism over
the last two centuries, it is common to associate globalisation phases in world history to the
existence of a global hegemon capable of imposing its will on distant territories.31
Immanuel
Wallerstein’s world-systems theory, which links the creation of global markets to the advent
of European colonial empires, is partially congruent with the theories of Charles
Kindleberger and Robert Gilpin in the sense that it links imperialism, colonialism, and
capitalist development.32
The research of Peter Cain, Tony Hopkins, and Darwin shows that
in the past, as in the present, the limitations of local sovereignty in inherent in the British
imperial system facilitated global flows of labour, goods, capital, and ideas.33
At the same time, it is reasonably clear that the possession of a degree of sovereignty,
by local and regional decision-makers is in the interests of global capital. Without the
possession of authority to make new laws and otherwise act against those who threaten the
interests of business, commercial development will be undermined. As it is difficult to
Development and the Transnationalization of Sovereignty,” International Organizations and Development,
1945-1990 (2014): 240. 28
Peter Dicken, Global Shift: Mapping the Changing Contours of the World Economy (SAGE Publications Ltd, 2007), 6-7. 29
Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: the Evolution of a Nineteenth-
Century Atlantic Economy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001); Gary B. Magee and Andrew S. Thompson, Empire
and Globalisation: Networks of People, Goods and Capital in the British world, c. 1850–1914 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2010). 30
Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels P. Petersson, Globalization: a Short History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2005), 82; Jeffry A. Frieden, Global Capitalism: Its Fall and Rise (New York and London: WW Norton,
2006). 31
Charles P. Kindleberger, “International Public Goods without International Government,” American
Economic Review, Vol. 76, No. 1 (1986): 1-13; Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the
International Economic Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 94-95. 32
Immanuel Wallerstein, “World-systems analysis,” Social Theory Today (1987): 309-324. 33
Peter J. Cain and Antony Gerald Hopkins. British Imperialism: 1688-2000 (London: Routledge, 2014); John
Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-system, 1830–1970 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 74, 125, 130.
7
micromanage governance from a distant imperial capital, at least some sovereignty must be
delegated if an imperial state is to retain a degree of efficiency in the course of ruling its
scattered worldwide possessions.34
The need for the delegation of sovereignty becomes
particularly clear if we use a working definition of sovereignty that links the concept to a
state monopoly on the use of physical force. Anarchic regions in which there is a total
absence of anything resembling sovereignty (e.g., failed states and other “ungoverned
spaces”) are inhospitable environments for the operation of the firms associated with global
flows of goods and capital.35
To say that capitalist firms tend to avoid ungoverned spaces is not to say that anarchy
and the absence of sovereignty are necessarily non-normative. The degree of anarchy seen in
ungoverned spaces can sometimes be the optimum solution in an imperfect world.36
Nevertheless, from the perspective of the individuals who manage global flows of capital and
goods, the existence of ungoverned spaces is undesirable, especially when such spaces
contain resources that can be profitably combined with resources already under their control.
In the 1860s, there was increasingly strong pressure from a variety of business interests in
eastern Canadian cities, particularly in Toronto, to increase the degree of Euro-Canadian
sovereignty in the sparsely populated territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company.37
In the late
1860s, Canadians came to regard this region as both a chaotic ungoverned space and a
storehouse of valuable resources.38
This desire to exert a degree of sovereignty over the
largely Aboriginal population of this region was an important factor in Canadian
constitutional politics in the 1860s, as one of the goals of the creators of the Canadian
constitution of 1867 was to exert control over this territory.39
As a Canadian parliamentarian
put it during an 1871 debate on the desirability of Canada’s territorial expansion to the
34
Benton, A Search for Sovereignty, 3. 35
Katharyne Mitchell, “Ungoverned Space: Global Security and the Geopolitics of Broken Windows," Political
Geography 29, no. 5 (2010): 289-297. 36
James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2009); Peter T. Leeson, Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-governance Works Better Than You
Think (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 37
James Maurice Stockford Careless, “Frontierism, Metropolitanism, and Canadian History,” Canadian
Historical Review 35, no. 1 (1954): 1-21; Doug Owram,. Promise of Eden: The Canadian Expansionist
Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), 32, 45. 38
Andrew R. Graybill, Policing the Great Plains: Rangers, Mounties, and the North American Frontier, 1875-
1910 ( University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 68-70. 39
William Lewis Morton, The Critical Years: the Union of British North America, 1857-1873 (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1964).
8
Pacific Ocean, “it was our duty and our interest too to complete Confederation and establish a
British Empire in North America.”40
Had British North Americans expressed a clear preference for independence in the
1860s, the British parliament almost certainly would have granted this request, thereby
terminating its sovereignty over northern North America. In 1837-8, British troops had
brutally crushed a republican rebellion in Lower Canada just as they had earlier tried to crush
the American Revolution and would subsequently crush anti-British risings in India and
elsewhere. Then, in the 1840s, the British gave internal home rule (“Responsible
Government”) to their colonies of white settlement in North America and Australasia.41
By
the 1860s, Britain had abandoned any notion of holding on to her remaining North American
colonies by force. By that point, a sizeable proportion of the British political class thought
that continued British sovereignty over the country’s North American colonies was a net
burden for the British taxpayer. 42
Indeed, some of the more strident “Little Englanders” in
Britain believed that Canada should be forced to be independent.43
For context, it should be
remembered that Britain abandoned sovereignty over the Ionian Islands in 1864, at the peak
of the ideology of fiscal retrenchment. In that year, the British handed United States of the
Ionian Islands over to Greek government, which promptly incorporated this territory into the
Kingdom of Greece.44
Britons in the 1860s were talking about reducing imperial burdens
rather than expanding the boundaries of the Empire.
40
Hector-Louis Langevin, 29 March 1871, House of Commons Debates, col. 700. 41
Phillip Buckner, The Transition to Responsible Government: British Policy in British North America, 1815-
1850 (Wesport: Greenwood Press, 1985). The parallel Australian story is discussed in Peter Cochrane, Colonial
Ambition: Foundations of Australia’s Democracy (Melbourne University Press, 2006). 42
Bernard Semmel ,The Liberal Ideal and the Demons of Empire : Theories of Imperialism from Adam Smith to
Lenin (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 17-38. 43
William Harbutt Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926), 189-90. For
Canadian reaction to Little Englandism, see Donald Creighton, “The Victorians and the Empire,” Canadian
Historical Review 19 (1938): 138-153. 44
Bruce Knox, “British policy and the Ionian Islands, 1847-1864: Nationalism and Imperial
Administration,” English Historical Review (1984): 503-529.
9
There were relatively few Little Englanders within Britain’s Conservative Party,
notwithstanding Benjamin Disraeli’s notorious 1852 remark that the North American
colonies were “wretched millstones” hanging on the neck of the British taxpayer.45
The Little
Englanders were, however, a sizeable minority within the Liberal governments led by
Palmerston (1859-1864) and Gladstone (1868-1874).46
Most of the leading Conservative and
Liberal politicians in Britain in the 1860s declared that the North American colonies could
become independent, but only if they so wished. In 1865, a British government lawyer named
Henry Thring went so far as to draft a statute that would have granted independence to any
colony of white settlement in which the elected legislature had passed two successive
resolutions requesting it.47
Unfortunately for Britain’s Little Englanders, the people of
British North America, or at least the articulate political classes of the region, were generally
opposed to leaving the British Empire. In fact, elite opinion in British North America was
opposed to this idea, which meant that the British felt compelled to retain a degree of
sovereignty over these territories. As the Edinburgh Review, an influential journal, put it:
“retainers who will neither give nor accept notice to quit our service must, it is assumed, be
kept on our establishment.”48
Sovereignty and Canadian Constitutional Politics in the 1860s
Had British North Americans wanted to become completely sovereign in the 1860s, it
would have been relatively easy for them to arrange the necessarily legislation at
45
Stanley R Stembridge, “Disraeli and the Millstones,” The Journal of British Studies 5, no. 01 (1965): 122-139. 46
John S. Galbraith, “Myths of the ‘Little England’ Era” The American Historical Review 67 (1961): 34-48;
Bernard Potter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford University
Press, 2004), 84-114. 47
Lord Thring, Provisions Intended as Suggestions for a Colonial Bill (London, 1865. Reprinted 1903).
Thring’s surviving personal papers, which are held by the Royal College of Music, do not shed light on why he
was asked to prepare this draft legislation. As other historians have noted, British ideas about which colonies
deserved Responsible Government and the theoretical right to leave the Empire were essentially racial.
Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and
the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 48
Quoted in Ged Martin, Britain and the Origins of Canadian Confederation, 1837-67 (Vancouver: University
of British Columbia Press, 1995), 173.
10
Westminster. However, few British North Americans favoured outright independence from
Britain. As I have shown in other publications, the federation of the British North America
colonies in the 1860s was intended as a means of keeping the colonies British. That this was
the intention is supported by remarks made by a variety of British and British colonial
politicians at the time.49
That the intention of the creators of the 1867 constitution was to
strengthen rather than diminish the colonies’ ties to Britain is suggested by the arrangement
of Quebec Resolutions of 1864, which were a draft outline of the constitution of 1867. The
first five of these resolutions dealt with the relationship of the colonies to the mother country,
the very first declaring the delegates’ belief that the “present and future prosperity of British
North America will be promoted by a Federal Union under the Crown of Great Britain”. The
third resolution stated that “in framing a Constitution” the delegates’ decision-making had
been shaped by their wish to perpetuate the connection with the mother country and to
replicate her political institutions “so far as our circumstances will permit”.50
At an October
1864 banquet given to honour the drafters of these resolutions, the President of the Quebec
City Board of Trade, Abraham Joseph, saluted the loyalty of the delegates. Joseph, who was
both a Sephardic Jew and a pillar of the local St. George’s Society, declared that the
merchants of Quebec City, “desired a union under one flag and that flag the good flag of old
England. (Cheers).”51
Joseph’s loyalty to the Crown illustrates the prevalence of the civic-
nationalist version of Britishness in 1860s Canada, an issue discussed below.
US-American observers agreed that federal constitution drafted at the 1864 Quebec
City conference was a measure that would help to keep Canada in the Empire.52
The New
York Tribune condemned the delegates in Quebec City for their “submissiveness” to England,
noting that they had been “very anxious to affirm their loyalty to the British Crown.”53
Some
US-Americans saw the proposed federation of the North American colonies as a threat to
America’s republican institutions. For instance, the New York Herald denounced England for
planning to foist a Brazilian-style hereditary viceroy on the poor people of British North
49
See my article “The Reaction of the City of London.” 50
‘Quebec Resolutions,’ in Confederation: Being a Series of Hitherto Unpublished Documents Bearing on the
British North America Act, ed. Sir Joseph Pope (Toronto: Carswell, 1895), 38-52. 51
Daily News, “Confederation of British America” 3 November 1864, 3; Annette R. Wolff, “Abraham Joseph”,
Dictionary of Canadian Biography. 52
Andrew Smith, British Businessmen and Canadian Confederation: Constitution-Making in an Era of Anglo-
Globalization (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008) 91-108. 53
New York Tribune, “The Canadian Federation” 20 October 1864, 4.
11
America.54
The New York Times also recognized that the promoters of Confederation wished
to draw closer to Britain, although it sneered that “‘the ‘monarchical principles’ on which it is
ostensibly said that the new Federation is to be based”‘ did not extend so far as to induce
Canadians to pay for a large standing army in peacetime.55
The Advertiser, a newspaper in
the border town of Calais, Maine regarded the plan to federate British North America as
unimportant because it would involve no change to the colonial status of the provinces. It
remarked that the colonists “do not propose to separate themselves from Great Britain. If they
did the movement would be one of great significance. And so long as they remain as
Provinces it is of not the slightest political consequence whether they unite or remain
separate.”56
The inhabitants of British North America evidently disagreed with the view that
the question of colonial federation was inconsequential and spent the next three years
debating whether the proposed constitution was better than the constitutional status quo.57
Both sides in this debate, however, favoured remaining in the British Empire and
passionately proclaimed their loyalty to the British Crown. Thus Joseph Howe, the Anti-
Confederation leader in Nova Scotia, was just as loyal to the British Empire as Charles
Tupper, the leading supporter of colonial amalgamation in that colony.58
In the 1865 debates
on Confederation in the PEI legislature, “no member, not even the most violent anti-
Confederate, would admit that he did not desire to continue to live under monarchical
institutions and the glorious flag of old England.”59
Monarchism and Canadian Political Culture in a Hemispheric Perspective
54
In its reply to the New York Herald, the Toronto Globe stated that people in British North America would
decide for themselves whether the federation’s chief magistrate would be named “Governor” ‘Viceroy’
‘President’ or ‘King’. Toronto Globe, “English Designs on America”, 15 September 1864, 2. 55
New York Times, “The Canadian Confederation: Imperial Designs”, 23 October 1864, 4. 56
Quoted in Saint John Weekly Telegraph, “Confederation: what our neighbours think” 7 December 1864, 3. 57
Peter B. Waite, The Life and Times of Confederation, 1864-1867: Politics, Newspapers, and the Union of
British North America (Toronto: Robin Brass Studio, 2001). 58
J. Murray Beck, Joseph Howe: Voice of Nova Scotia (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University
Press, 1964). 59
Francis W.P. Bolger, Prince Edward Island and Confederation, 1863-1873 (Charlottetown: St. Dunstan”s
University Press, 1964), 116-117.
12
Most contemporaries recognized that the aim of Confederation was to keep the
colonies within the British Empire. Canadians’ evident loyalty to the Crown was driven, in
part, by a belief in the benefits of monarchical political institutions over their republican
alternatives. This belief that blended constitutions that included monarchical institutions were
generally superior was seen in the ideas of Thomas D’Arcy McGee. McGee had been a
radical republican nationalist in his native Ireland. In the 1840s, he had participated an armed
uprising that sought to create a sovereign Irish republic.60
He became a fervent advocate of
the British connection after settling in Montreal. In the 1860s, McGee waxed poetic on the
great blessings British sovereignty had brought to Canada. Given that the republican
experiment that had begun in 1776 was being severely tested at this time, McGee’s argument
resonated with many of Queen Victoria’s subjects in northern North America.61
In 1863, he
proposed a permanent viceroy for Canada on the Brazilian model, suggesting that one of
Queen Victoria’s younger sons should become Canada’s king.62
Like most Canadians,
McGee had little direct experience with Brazil, the western hemisphere’s only durable
resident monarchy. McGee followed many British observers in attributing the stability and
prosperity of Brazil to the fact it was a monarchy not a republic. In speeches in the Canadian
parliament, McGee denounced the republican institutions of the United States and proclaimed
his preference for the ancient establishment of monarchy. In 1858, he declared that “my
native disposition is reverence towards things old and veneration for the landmarks of the
past.” He explained away his flirtation with republicanism as due to the excesses of British
rule in Ireland. He also declared that he was “as loyal to the institutions under which I live in
Canada as any Tory of the old or the new school.”63
McGee believed that without the stabilising forces of monarchy and active
government, New World societies would inevitably degenerate into anarchy. McGee sensed
60
David Wilson, Thomas D'Arcy McGee: Passion, Reason, and Politics, 1825-1857 (Montreal and Kingston:
McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2008), 259, 328, 4. 61
Thomas D’Arcy McGee, The Crown and the Confederation: Three Letters to the Hon. John Alexander
McDonald, Attorney General for Upper Canada (Montreal: J. Lovell, 1864). 62
British American Magazine, McGee ‘A Plea for British American nationality’ (August1863), 1:337 -345, 342.
For the possibility that Canada might acquire a permanent hereditary viceroy chosen from among Victoria’s
sons, see Saint John Morning News, ‘The Vice-Royalty’ 21 October 1864, 2. 63
Thomas L. Connolly, Funeral Oration on the Late Hon. Thos. D’Arcy McGee : Delivered in the Metropolitan
Church of St. Mary’s, Halifax, Nova Scotia on Friday 24th April, A D. 1868 (Halifax [N.S.] : Compton, 1868),
12.
13
that in the New World, individuals lacked the customary and legal restraints common in
Europe. In a book on federal government published in 1865, he remarked that the people of
Canada, “like all other American communities (when compared with European countries)
have necessarily very decided democratic tendencies within them.” McGee was here using
the word democracy to suggest an unruly mob, acting on its whims. He then said that the task
of the present generation of British North Americans was to see that “authority is exalted”
and that the best way of doing so was to strengthen the power of the central executive power
in any future British North American federation. McGee regarded “executive impotency” as
the major cause of social disorder in the other federations that had been created throughout
history. Although he conceded that the US constitution of 1789 was “a vast advance on the
previous Articles of Confederation” it nevertheless provided for too weak a government due
to the compromises nationalist statesman such as Alexander Hamilton had been forced to
make with “state jealousy” and the “wild theories of the demagogues of the day”. McGee
regarded the Empire of Brazil as perhaps the best federation in the hemisphere, attributing
that country’s relative peace and stability to its monarchical institutions.64
The fact the
Brazil’s prosperity was based on slavery went unmentioned by both McGee and by the
British North American politicians who visited that country in early 1866 on a trade
mission.65
Like many British North Americans, they were largely indifferent to the question
of the rights of Black people.
Evidence for Popular Support for Remaining Within the British Empire
Elite opinion in British North America in the 1860s was generally hostile to the idea
of a complete break with Britain. It is hard to assess the extent to which this attitude was
shared by ordinary Canadian farmers, lumberjacks, and petty traders, as public opinion
polling did reach Canada until the 1930s. However, as far was can tell, most ordinary
colonists shared the elite’s belief that remaining in the British Empire would be a good thing.
On the eve of the 1864 constitutional convention in Quebec City, reporter Charles MacKay
assessed colonial attitudes to the British connection for the readers of the Times of London.
64
Thomas Darcy McGee, Notes on Federal Governments, Past and Present (Montreal : Dawson, 1865 (51, 52,
44, 34. 65
For this trade mission, see my forthcoming paper with Kirsten Greer in the Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History.
14
He said that of the three basic options open to the colonists, (i.e., joining the United States,
becoming an independent republic, or remaining within the Empire), the vast majority of
Canadians favoured the latter. MacKay based this statement on conversations he had had all
over the Province of Canada. In the course of a 1,200 mile journey through the colony, he had
“interchanged ideas``’ on this issue with men at all levels of society, from stagecoach drivers
and farmers to merchants and ``’members of the legislature of every political party.”
MacKay said that the desire to remain British subjects was shared by the French Canadians,
the descendants of the old United Empire Loyalists, and the more recent immigrants from the
British Isles, the three main groups in the Canadian electorate. MacKay summed up the
situation: “Canadian loyalty is not a thing of light account.”66
The English novelist Anthony
Trollope observed in 1862 that “the loyalty of both the Canadas to Great Britain is beyond all
question.”67
A newspaper in Glasgow came to similar conclusions in 1865: “Mr. Howe, Lord
Monck, the members of the Canadian Ministry who lately visited this country, every
politician, traveller, or journalist of the slightest note, concur in stating that the people of
British North America are almost without exception loyal to their Queen…”68
In an address to the Mechanics’ Institute of Saint John, New Brunswick, Nova
Scotia’s Charles Tupper said that “the day has long since passed when the idea of annexation
to our republican neighbours, or of the formation of an independent republic, was entertained
by any portion of these provinces.”69
Individuals in all regions of British North Americans
who expressed annoyance when British people doubted their loyalty to the Crown or
discussed the utility of forcing the colonies to leave the British Empire. Thomas Gladwin
Hurd of Toronto sent an acerbic letter to a London newspaper to remind it of the many
donations to British patriotic funds which had been remitted from Canada: “I do trust when
English journals discuss matters colonial, especially Canadian, they will remember that we
too are Englishmen. The Irish famine, the Crimean War, the Indian mutiny, attest our loyalty.
Any national calamity and our purse was opened.”70
In Hurd’s eyes, colonial donations to
British patriotic funds demonstrated that the people of the colonies were bona fide
“Englishmen”, a term he carelessly used, like so many contemporaries, to denote any British
66
The Times (London), “Canada And The Canadians” Saturday, 22 October, 1864; pg. 9; col C. 67
Anthony Trollope, North America (London: Chapman & Hall, 1862), 256. 68
Glasgow Herald, editorial, 5 September 1865. 69
Charles Tupper, Recollection of Sixty Years in Canada (Toronto: Cassell and Company,1914), 24. 70
Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, ‘Canada and Her Position’ 28 July 1861.
15
subject.71
Although he did not mention it, Canadians had formed a regiment to help their
British cousins to suppress the recent uprising against British rule in India.72
Identification with Britain was, of course, stronger in some localities than in others.
Richard Cartwright, a politician first elected to the Canadian parliament in 1863, discussed
this issue in his memoirs. He recalled that attitudes towards the United States had been much
more positive in western Upper Canada than in the old United Empire Loyalist settlements
along the Saint Lawrence. In his parliamentary constituency, Lennox and Addington, many
voters were the grandsons of the pro-British refugees who left the Thirteen Colonies during
the American Revolution. In such communities, there was a strong sense of loyalty to Britain.
Cartwright’s own grandfather was one of these refugees. In regions of Canada that were
settled in the nineteenth century, the political culture was quite different: Cartwright
recollected that when a business trip took him to the area west of Toronto in 1856, he had
been surprised and even “disgusted” by the widespread “sentiment in favour of union with
the United States.”73
Many farmers and others in that region thought that joining the United
States would bring prosperity.
Opposition to the Prevailing Desire to Remain within the British Empire
It appears that a majority of British North Americans wished to remain part of the
British Empire. However, there was substantial dissent from this view. Some wished to
become part of the United States, the Great Republic. Others wished to form an independent
Canadian republic. Advocates of the latter option had few allies outside of Canada. However,
those Canadians who favoured so-called “continental union” had allies in Washington, at
least for a brief period in the 1860s.
71
See ‘Return of Amount Contributed by Colonies Towards Patriotic Fund; Number of Russian Guns, taken
during late war, distributed as Trophies amongst Colonies.’ Great Britain Parliamentary Papers, 1857-8,
Command Paper No. 65, 3-4. 72
J. Mackay Hitsman, “How Successful was the 100th
Royal Canadians” 31 (1967) Military Affairs; David L.
Stone, “Perceptions of an Imperial Crisis: Canadian Reactions to the Sepoy Mutiny, 1857-8”, M.A. Thesis,
University of British Columbia, 1984. 73
Richard Cartwright, Reminiscences (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1912), 20.
16
For context, it should be remembered that in the late 1840s, a large section of the
English-speaking business community in Montreal had signed a petition that had called for
Canada to become a US-American state. This petition was also supported by Louis-Joseph
Papineau, who had led Lower Canada’s republican rising in 1837-8.74
The wave of
Annexationist sentiment represented by the Manifesto had largely dissipated by the end of
1850, in part because the United States government made it very clear that it was unwilling to
consider annexing Canada. The United States had just conquered much of Mexico and was
too busy consolidating its rule there to undertake northward expansion as well. Moreover,
Washington was unwilling to consider admitting northern territories that would upset the
delicate Congressional balance between slave and free states. Southern Congressmen were
downright hostile to the proposed annexation of Canada.75
This deadlock persisted
throughout the 1850s, when the Southern-dominated Democratic Party controlled the White
House and the Senate.
In the aftermath of the election of Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, in November 1860,
many southern states left the union and recalled their congressional representatives. This
move allowed for the issue of the acquisition of Canada to be re-opened. In January 1861, as
state after state in the lower south announced its secession, the New York Herald proposed
that the northern states let the south depart in peace and instead concentrate on annexing
British North America as compensation. The Herald, which was edited by the James Gorden
Bennett, a Scottish immigrant who had lived in the North American colonies, reasoned that a
union between the free-soil states and the slavery-free British provinces would be a more
natural one than the former union between North and the slave-holding South. 76
Lincoln did not accept this advice and resolved to keep the South in the Union by
force, but some senior Republicans inclined to this view. Lincoln’s Secretary of State,
74
LB. Shippee, Canadian-American Relations, 1849-1874 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1939), 1-12;
Jacques Monet, “French Canada and the Annexation Crisis, 1848–1850,” Canadian Historical Review 47
(1966): 249-264l Ged Martin, “The Canadian rebellion losses bill of 1849 in British politics,” The Journal of
Imperial and Commonwealth History 6, no. 1 (1977): 3.. 75
Shippee, Canadian-American Relations, 17-20; Cephas D. Allin and George M. Jones, Annexation,
Preferential Tariff and Reciprocity (Toronto: Musson 1912), 99. 76
Shippee, Canadian-American Relations 183.
17
William Henry Seward, proposed the annexation of Canada in a confidential memorandum
for the President in early April 1861, shortly before the first shots of the Civil War were fired
at Fort Sumter. 77
Seward, who was from New York State, had first advocated the peaceful
acquisition of Canada in an 1857. 78
In 1857, he had condemned the Southerners’ opposition
to annexing Canada, declaring that it would have been better had the United States expanded
northwards into British America rather than southwards into Mexico. Speaking of his recent
tour of Canada and Labrador, he said that he had found the “inhabitants vigorous, hardy,
energetic, perfected by the Protestant religion and British constitutional liberty.” Seward
condemned the current policy of the Democratic administration, which involved “spurning
vigorous, perennial, and ever growing Canada while seeking to establish feeble states out of
decaying Spanish provinces on the coast and in the islands of the Gulf of Mexico.”79
Seward
was alluding to the faction of the Democratic Party that then supported filibustering
expeditions and other measures designed to bring Caribbean basin territories into the United
States as slave states.80
Campaigning for Lincoln in Minnesota in September 1860, Seward
had praised the rapid economic progress of the British North American colonies, declaring
that their “enlightened” governments were “building excellent States to be hereafter admitted
into the American Union.”81
The start of the Civil War in 1861 put the issue of northward expansion on hold. Few
Canadians wished to join a country that was racked by civil war. After the surrender of the
Confederacy in April 1865, Canadian interest in Annexation quickly revived. The revival in
Canadian interest in joining the United States appears to have been driven primarily by
economic considerations, namely, a commercial depression and Washington’s announcement
in March 1865 that it was going to abrogate the 1854 Reciprocity Treaty, which had given
colonial natural products duty-free entry into the Republic. In the summer and autumn of
77
Robin W. Winks, Canada and the United States : the Civil War Years (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press,
1960), 4-5, 33-34; Glyndon G. Van Deusen, William Henry Seward (New York : Oxford University Press,
1967), 535-7. 78
Shippee, Canadian-American Relations, 184. 79
Appendix No. II “Reflections on the Future of British America by Hon. W.H. Seward” in Henry Youle Hind,
Explorations in the Interior of the Labrador Peninsula the Country of the Montagnais and Nasquapee Indians